Anthony Avalos's mother and her boyfriend were found guilty Tuesday of murdering the 10-year-old boy in a child torture case that shocked California in 2018.
A Los Angeles County judge found both Heather Barron and her boyfriend Kareem Leiva guilty of first-degree murder in a non-jury trial.
The couple were also found guilty of
torture and two counts of child abuse related to Avalos' siblings
, who were identified as Destiny, 13, and Rafael, 12.
Now Barron and Leiva face a possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.
The death penalty was ruled out by prosecutors, who did not consider it an appropriate punishment "under any circumstances."
A team of paramedics found the boy without a pulse and brain dead at the house where he lived with his mother, her boyfriend and several other siblings in Lancaster, a city north of Los Angeles.
His brothers testified during the trial that they saw Leiva grab Anthony by the ankles and throw him headfirst to the ground about twenty times the day before police were alerted that he was unconscious.
Anthony Avalos.
The Prosecutor's Office insisted during the process that the death of the minor was a consequence of the cruelty of his mother and her partner.
"They are nothing short of monsters for what they did. Both defendants are evil individuals
," Los Angeles County Assistant District Attorney Jonathan Hatami said during closing arguments Feb. 23.
Barron, 33, and Leiva, 37, pleaded not guilty to murder and abusing the woman's two other children.
Both preferred to have Judge Sam Ohta issue a sentence rather than face a jury.
They have been in pretrial detention without bail since they were arrested as suspects in the death of the minor, in 2018. Between the two they have 12 children from different relationships, the EFE news agency reported.
A life of abuse
Avalos passed away just weeks after finishing fourth grade with excellent grades.
His death uncovered the life of mistreatment he suffered at the hands of his mother and her partner for years.
Anthony Avalos.Telemundo News
“He looked dead.
His eyes were sunken.
You could count his ribs, ”said Ronald Watts, one of the firefighters who went to the house, during a hearing.
Among the forms of torture they suffered, the little boy's brothers recounted in court that they went hungry because they were not given food, they endured cuts and burns, they were repeatedly whipped with belts and cables, they were forced to hit each other, they were forced to eat sauce spicy or to kneel on raw rice, nails or cement, until suffering terrible injuries.
His relatives reported the abuse of which he and his siblings were subjected up to 13 times over four years to the Los Angeles County Department of Children and Family Services, according to official records, but no official removed custody of the mother
. nor did he take them out of the house.
They reveal chilling details of the torture suffered by the boy Anthony Avalos
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In October of last year, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors agreed to pay $32 million to Avalos' brothers and father after the family denounced the inaction of social workers in the case.
The relatives also reached an economic agreement with the child health and welfare agency Sycamores Child and Family Services, although the agreed amount was not disclosed, according to Noticias Telemundo.
"They pretend they did nothing"
The Prosecutor's Office assured in the final arguments that the mother was "the mastermind" of the torture and her boyfriend was the one who carried it out.
But Barron's defense argued during the trial that she herself was a victim of domestic violence and presented her as a person unable to protect her children because of the violence she had suffered.
"Every man in her life abused her in one way or another, starting with her stepfather. This is all she's ever known," said her attorney, Nancy Sperber.
"She had no power to stop it. She had no power to say no," she said of the woman's children.
Anthony Avalos holds a drawing. Telemundo News
Leiva's defense recognized on his side the harshness of the episodes to which Avalos and his brothers were subjected, but tried to release him from the responsibility of having inflicted the injuries that led to the death of the child.
His behavior "shows a very misguided attempt to discipline a child. But that is not murder," said his lawyer, Dan Chambers.
He also questioned "the accuracy" of the brothers' story, letting it be understood that Leiva took Avalos by the armpits - and not by the ankles, as they said - the day before he was found brain dead in her house.
“They have the face of pretending they did nothing.
They killed the child, they tortured him," María Barrón, Anthony's aunt, told Telemundo News.
“It hurts me a lot to know everything the boy went through,” she added.
Los Angeles will compensate the family of Anthony Avalos with 32 million dollars
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"Looking at a child on the ground,
beaten, covered from head to toe
, is traumatizing for them," the children's aunt, María Barrón, said of Anthony Avalos in an interview with Noticias Telemundo.
The death of Avalos aroused outrage in Los Angeles due to the similarities with the case of Gabriel Fernández, an eight-year-old boy from Palmdale, also north of Los Angeles, who died in 2013 from the torture to which his mother and his father subjected him. stepfather while the family was under investigation by the Department of Children and Family Services.
The mother was sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty, while her boyfriend was sentenced to death.
The trial for Anthony Avalos presents new details about his death and the abuse he suffered
Feb 24, 202302:22
Another similar case that shocked southern California was that of little Noah Cuatro, who died in July 2019, also in Palmdale.
The four-year-old boy was the victim of sexual abuse and torture by his parents, despite spending his entire life under the radar of social services, who took custody of him several times.
His parents, Jose Maria Cuatro and Úrsula Elaine Juárez, were arrested and accused of murder.
They declared that the boy had drowned in a swimming pool, but the autopsy revealed that he had fractured vertebrae and ribs, lacerations on his liver, and bruises all over his body, in addition to the fact that he had been sexually abused the same day he died
.
